MIAMI — Long before Lionel Messi was a larger-than-life soccer icon with 468 million Instagram followers, before he became one of the world’s richest athletes and immortalized on giant murals from Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Calcutta to Miami, he was the tiniest boy on the field at Grandoli, the neighborhood soccer club in his hometown of Rosario, Argentina.
Were it not for his doting grandmother shaming a coach into putting the diminutive kid in a game and FC Barcelona offering to pay for his $900-a-month growth hormone treatments, Messi would likely not be a World Cup champion. He would not have won a record seven Ballon d’Or World Player of the Year trophies.
Nor would he have landed in South Florida this week to embark on the most unexpected chapter of his career. Messi shocked the world on June 7 when he announced he was rejecting a $500 million deal from Saudi Arabia and a sentimental pull to return to FC Barcelona, where he spent the first 21 years of his career, to join Inter Miami of Major League Soccer.
